Jobless Pool Their Optimism in Quest for Winning Attitude
Times are tough all over, brother.
No sense getting down about it, though. It could be worse.
No job? There’s your health. That shot, too? What about the family? Maybe their health is good.
There’s got to be something, anything, to keep a faint flicker of hope alive. At least that’s the attitude of the folks who gather each week in the basement of the Burbank Church of Religious Science.
These are endless optimists, people who figure the universe is turning their way even when everyday life kicks them senseless. They wait for their ship to come in even as the dock collapses beneath them.
None have jobs. Most are deeply in debt. And the name of the group is WINNERs--Working Individuals Not Necessarily Employed Recently. Recently, some admitted, can mean 18 months. Or two years.
So every Thursday, a dozen or so Winners--membership rises or falls with the unemployment rate--meet around a table in the church basement to swap stories, offer job-hunting tips and, most of all, say nice things to each other. It’s a way of getting through yet another week of rejection letters and unanswered calls.
As the group shuffles in one recent afternoon, a fortysomething writer named Lynn explains jokingly that she is “sort of semi-employed. That is, if you count selling a screenplay they haven’t paid me a cent for.”
Of the six gathered this noon, four are, or were, or want to be involved in The Industry, that hypnotic business that churns out the pulsating blue half-light of modern entertainment.
“Anybody had a lot of trouble with unemployment?” Lynn asks, opening her lunch.
Bewildered stares. The question, after all, seems to have an obvious answer.
“Oh, I mean, the office, you know?” she says, explaining that her unemployment checks are delayed because someone else was using her Social Security number.
Those around the table begin to offer advice, which flows here like the Nile, regular deluges of fertile information. One woman complains of being hassled by creditors, and everyone offers time-tested tips--not answering the phone to threatening persistent callers with harassment charges.
In walks church pastor and group leader Marlene Morris, who slips in her own advice: Don’t read the newspaper, at least not the financial page. Facts undermine hope.
“Statistics show what the big picture is doing,” she says. “That has nothing to do with you.”
And that is the way it goes here. Bad vibes produce bad results. Hope delivers the goods.
For every negative, someone must also offer a positive, even if it is just feeling less lousy than the day before.
Consider Ralph, a 47-year-old actor who has not acted in a while and is living off savings. He would not mind doing commercials--if he could get one. Pitching chicken wings has none of the grace or power of “Macbeth,” but it pays the rent.
The weekend before, Ralph says, the “scareds,” that creepy, consuming feeling of impending disaster, hit again. Two hospital stays for heart surgery with no health insurance has left him thousands of dollars in the hole.
But Ralph found the requisite nugget of hope. “I looked at the money I owed and I figured I was a helluva prosperous person for this much credit to be run up on. I can do it again.
“I’ll do whatever it takes, but I’m an actor,” he said. “God didn’t give me this talent to sit in an office all day.”
The plaint is heard again and again.
“They’re not hiring what I need.”
“I have the talent, but can’t get a chance.”
“I need more than they are prepared to pay.”
“A lot of people our age are really burned out,” says Karen, a 43-year-old office manager. “We don’t want to get into the corporate garbage again.”
Lynn knows. After writing for the tube and the big screen, she has taken to writing shows for theme parks. But even those jobs are sporadic.
“I’ve tried secretarial work,” Lynn says. “But everybody is younger than me. I just want to say, ‘You little twerp. Get your own phone, your own coffee.’ We’ve all paid our dues. We don’t want to pay them again.”
She pauses, her palms upturned.
“The pride thing is definitely there,” she says. “Once you’ve reached a certain level, it’s hard to come back down.”
Understanding nods.
For Anna-Lisa, a production supervisor for television shows and motion pictures, jobs come and go with the predictability of a Midwestern thunderstorm. But when her last film, “Friday the 13th: Part 9,” stopped production, she was out of work with no prospects.
That was seven weeks ago.
So she fills her down time time writing scripts. And she has discovered that, although production work is enjoyable, writing, oh, “that’s my real love.”
More understanding nods.
As the lunch hour gives way to the afternoon lineup of talk shows, the meeting winds down and the group, in unison, reads aloud a motivational mantra written by Morris. The aim is to release their inner power from the chains of self-doubt.
“I believe, I know, that there is a creative Intelligence, an inner Wisdom, a valuable talent, and a special gift, that is within me, which I have a responsibility to share with Life.
“And I know that as I offer this gift to Life, Life supports me totally.”
The mantra rambles for several minutes through the Decision, Release, Request, Support and Gratitude steps, and concludes with Agreement:
“We have an agreement with life, and we support each other in it. We go out into Life this week expecting only the best and determining to accept only the best that Life has to offer.”
